By Father Stephen Freeman, January 15, 2018 It is a commonplace in the Fathers to describe despair or sadness as the result of failing to get what we want. It sounds quite simple, but it cuts to the very heart of our sadness. There is a melancholy of our age that is born from the expectations of modernity. The mantra of progress and our belief that no matter the problems confronting us, there is always
By David Bentley Hart, October 2003 It is true of Aristotle too: the dialectic of act and potency that, for sublunary beings, is inseparable from decay and death, or the scale of essences by which all things—especially various classes of persons—are assigned their places in the natural and social order. Stoicism offers an obvious example: a vision of the universe as a fated, eternally repeated divine and cosmic history, a world in which finite forms
Can a Parrot Be Worth More than an Orphan? Some men, instead of learning how to keep house and look after themselves, have recourse to domestic servants, and get themselves cooks and housemaids. Others, womanisers, spend whole days with their lady loves, telling lewd stories and corrupting them with their remarks and their deceitful actions. Others still, become slaves to lust through the influence of high-ranking prostitutes and behave like pigs in the trough. Some
DAY ONE 1. When the holy Father (Abba) Anthony was living in the desert he was afflicted with lethargy (“accidie” – despondency/melancholy), and attacked by many imaginations (“logismoi”- thoughts/imaginations). He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts will not leave me alone. What shall I do in my afflictions? How can I be saved? A little later, when he went outside, Anthony saw a man like himself sitting at his
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